The central government has been working hard to find solutions to rural problems. This time: a comprehensive reform package.

While not a new idea, this is truly a valuable one.

It was surely not as recently as last week's State Council conference on rural reform that the central government came up with the idea; it has long realized the importance of comprehensive reform initiatives to jazz up rural society.

The national meeting is a sign that a general consensus has been reached to push the reforms more strongly and in a more thorough way.

Drawing on experiences from past reforms, the government hammered out the "building a new countryside" drive last year. On proposing that plan, the policy-makers made it clear that it will not be solely an economic catch-up movement, but a comprehensive social rejuvenation aimed to construct a moderately well-off and harmonious rural society.

That high-profile plan is supposed to achieve higher productivity, better-off living, communal civility, clean and tidy communities and democratic governance in the rural areas.

The latest national meeting proposed the road towards those goals. The improvement in governance at the grassroots level, as the meeting concluded, is the major goal of reform. The administrative change, coupled with a viable rural fiscal system and adequate public goods, is expected to alter the overall rural landscape.

People are not divided on the importance of such a functional change, centered on staff streamlining, administrative efficiency and transparency; but it has seldom been fully implemented so far.

The core of the move lies in the will to serve the people and respect their demands, as advocated by the Party and government.

Some grass-roots governments, however, have lost the hearts of farmers because they either do not take heed of their needs or fail to carry out their duty to satisfy their demands.

Expansion of grass-roots democracy, therefore, is of vital importance to goad the local governments to pay more attention to their real role as leaders of local communities.

It will link the local people and grassroots governments, and make them interact with each other in their collective effort to build a new countryside.

It may be for that reason that Premier Wen Jiabao proposed at the national conference that villagers' self-governance, democratic elections, decision-making, management and supervision be "improved."

Without such grass-roots democratic initiatives, mere top-down calls for a change in the function of local administration will not accomplish much.

(China Daily September 5, 2006)